I was afraid of what might follow. It took a long time. I glanced towards Mariam; her silence irritated me only a little less than her questions. She no longer looked at me, but she had not put on her veil again, in spite of the dust of the road. I turned towards her and looked at her properly, for the first time for a long time. She was no less appealing than on the day when I saw her coming towards me in her mother’s arms in the galley which brought us into exile. Her skin was no less pink, her lips no less shining. Only the kohl on her eyelids gave her the air of a woman. And her silhouette. As I looked at her, she sat up, and I could make out the line of her bosom. Her heart was beating, or was it mine? I lowered my eyes. In a single year, she had ripened, she had become beautiful and arousing.
‘When I have children, will you love them?’
I should have been annoyed, but I smiled, because I suddenly remembered her habit, since she was a year old, of asking for the same toy three, four, ten times, in the same tone without giving up.
‘Of course I shall love them.’
‘Will you also talk to their mother like your uncle talks to Salma?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘Will you visit her often? Will you ask her if all is well with her? Will you listen to her sorrows?’
‘Yes, Mariam, yes!’
She pulled sharply on her bridle; her mule reared up. I stopped; she looked straight at me:
‘But why do you never speak to me? Why do you never come and ask me if I weep at night? I must fear all other men: my father today, my husband tomorrow, all those who are not related to me and from whom I should hide myself.’
She gave the mule its head, and it set off at a trot. I hurried to stay at her side. I still did not speak to her, but oddly enough, I was frightened for her, and a sudden affection for her radiated from my eyes. It seemed as if some danger awaited her.
Halfway between Fez and Meknes we stopped for the night in a village called ‘Ar, Shame. The imam of the mosque offered to accommodate us in returh for a donation for the orphans whom he looked after. He was without great learning, but with a very pleasant manner, and lost no time in telling us why this village should have such a name.
The inhabitants, he informed us, had always been known for their greed, and used to suffer from this reputation. The merchant caravans avoided it and would not stop there. One day, having learned that the King of Fez was hunting lions in the neighbourhood, they decided to invite him and his court, and killed a number of sheep in his honour. The sovereign had dinner and went to bed. Wishing to show their generosity, they placed a huge goatskin bottle before his door and agreed to fill it up with milk for the royal breakfast. The villagers all had to milk their goats and then each of them had to go to tip his bucket into the container. Given its great size, each of them said to himself that he might just as well dilute his milk with a good quantity of water without anyone noticing. To the extent that in the morning such a thin liquid was poured out for the king and his court that it had no other taste than the taste of meanness and greed.
However, what I remember of my stay in that village had nothing to do with the incurable fault of its inhabitants but far more with the indescribably frightening experience which I had there.
The imam had received us well, and suggested that we should sleep in a wooden hut near the mosque, which had a pen next to it for our animals. Warda and Mariam slept inside, while my father and I preferred to sleep on the roof, where we could take advantage of the cool air of the summer night. So we were there on the roof when, around midnight, two huge lions, evidently attracted by the smell of the horses and the mules, came up to our door and tried to tear down the rough fence of thorns which protected our beasts. The horses began to neigh as if possessed, and threw themselves against the walls of the hut, which threatened to collapse with each charge. This continued for two hours or more, until one of the lions, no doubt enraged by the thousands of needles which pricked him every time he tried to get over the fence, turned towards the door and began to scratch it and slash at it with his claws. My father and I watched all this, powerless to intervene, knowing full well that the animals might break their way through to the women and eat them up without us being able to do anything other than watch from the roof, apart from wanting to throw ourselves at their jaws as a matter of honour. From below we could hear Mariam’s screams and Warda’s prayers, calling upon the Madonna in Castilian.
In a trembling voice, Muhammad made a vow: if we survived, he would break his journey to make a pilgrimage to the village of Taghya, and place an offering upon the tomb of wali Bu ‘Izza, a saint famous for his many miracles involving lions.
I do not know whether it was the intercession of the saint or that of the mother of the Messiah which was the more effective, but in any case the lions eventually seemed to become weary and lose interest, and in the first glimmers of dawn they went away, although their roars, which were only a little less frightening, still reached us from the nearby mountain. It was only when the village came to life in the early hours of the morning that we had the courage to leave our shelter. However, before continuing our journey, we had to wait for a long caravan to come past. Determined to fulfil his vow immediately, Muhammad wanted to find a group of pilgrims at Meknes who were leaving for Taghya.
Arriving there a week later, and seeing the vast crowd of people who, like ourselves, were visiting the wali’s tomb, I understood the perpetual dread which lions strike in the hearts of the inhabitants of Africa. I was to experience this even more profoundly during my travels. How many times, on arriving at a village, have I seen the inhabitants gathered together, in deep distress, because a family has just been devoured by these savage beasts! How many times, when wishing to go in a particular direction, have the guides directed me another way, simply because a pride of lions had just decimated a whole caravan! It has even happened that one of these beasts alone attacked a detachment of two hundred armed horsemen, and managed to kill five or six of them before beating a retreat.
Certainly, the lion is the bravest of all animals, and I say this unreservedly, because I bore the name of this beast for the eight years of my stay in Italy. However, I must make it clear that those who live in the cold lands are far less fierce than those who live in the hotter ones. In order to silence a braggart in Fez, one says to him ‘You are as brave as the lions of Agla; even the calves can nibble at their tails.’ It is true that in the place of this name a child only has to run shouting behind a lion for the latter to run away. In another village in the mountains, called Red Stone, the lions wander between the houses to eat the bones which are left out for them, and everyone mixes with them without fear. I have also heard that when a woman finds herself alone witji a lion in an isolated place she has only to uncover a certain part of her body in front of him for the animal to roar loudly, lower his eyes and slink away. May everyone be free to believe what he will!
On the way back from this makeshift pilgrimage, I remembered the vague feeling of apprehension that I had experienced for Mariam. A premonition of the lions’ attack on our hut? For the time being, I thought so. At the age of twelve I still believed that as between beasts and men the former could do the most damage.
The Year of the Great Recitation
907 A.H.
17 July 1501 — 6 July 1502